Riots and Political Protest ─ Notes from the Post-political Present

The years 2008-12 saw waves of political and social protest take place across the world, from the Occupy Movement, to the Arab Spring, to the London riots. These protests took place in the context of the global economic crash and the immediate political response. This book uses original empirical data gathered among rioters and protesters in the UK, Spain, Greece and Egypt to inform a theoretical critique of contemporary politics and social order; in so doing it examines and makes sense of the fundamental motivations of rioters and political protestors and connects these motivations to an objective social reality of global economic collapse, austerity cuts and mass unemployment.

Written by leading criminological theorists and drawing on the work of Lacan, Badiou and Zizek, this book makes a major contribution to contemporary debates on social order, postmodernism and cultural capitalism.

Simon Winlow is Professor of Criminology at Teesside University and Co-Director of the Teesside Centre for Realist Criminology. He is the author ofBadfellas (Berg, 2001) and co-author of Bouncers (Oxford University Press, 2003),Violent Night (Berg, 2006), Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture (Willan, 2008),Rethinking Social Exclusion (Sage, 2013) and Revitalizing Criminological Theory(Routledge, 2015). He is also the co-editor of New Directions in Crime and Deviancy (Routledge, 2012) andNew Directions in Criminological Theory (Routledge, 2012).

Steve Hall is Professor of Criminology at Teesside University and Co-Director of the Teesside Centre for Realist Criminology. He is author ofTheorizing Crime and Deviance (Sage, 2012), and co-author of Revitalizing Criminological Theory(Routledge, 2015), Rethinking Social Exclusion (Sage, 2013), Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture(Routledge, 2008) and Violent Night (Berg, 2006). He is also the co-editor ofNew Directions in Criminology (Routledge, 2012).

James Treadwell is a lecturer in Criminology at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of the best-selling textbooksCriminology (2006) and Criminology: The Essentials (2012). He is perhaps best known as an ethnographer, and he has published articles in a number of leading criminology and criminal justice journals.

Daniel Briggs is Professor of Criminology at the Universidad Europea in Madrid. He is the author ofDeviance and Risk on Holiday (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013) and Crack Cocaine Users (Routledge, 2012) and co-author ofCulture and Immigration in Context (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014) and Assessing the Impact and Use of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders(Policy Press, 2007). He is also the editor of The English Riots of 2011 (Waterside Press, 2012).